Trans And Relative Dimensions In Space, by Ayla Sullivan

I’ve been telling myself for a long time there’s gotta be an easier way to come out to my family. An accessible way. No academic jargon. No easy to google slang, because I know for a fact y’all are too lazy to ever do work you can just push onto a Black person to explain for you.

My grandfather raised me on visual media, charted years of golden era kinda love. His favourite Doctor is Tom Baker and his undying, fanboy passion is a Galifrayian typa magic he has passed onto me. I’d redo my coming out with him in simpler terms. Tell him my gender is the TARDIS because it’s bigger on the inside. My queerness is powered by a tesseract. I am expansive in all dimensions, in every time, and fluid. This a queerness and a transness that cannot, ever die. A typa queer that never has to fear death, only trust in my own regeneration promise. Of course, though, what is gayer than fearing your friends’ death? Constantly trying to find joy in the danger of navigating your life, traveling so often because home is its own transformative property, and knowing, always knowing, solidarity is a threat and your companions endanger themselves because of their proximity to you. Of course it’s easy to feel like the last of your kind in a genocide.

Still, this why every queer out there is equipped with two hearts. We don’t let our heart break no more. We cuddle double the love, double the wound, and can repurpose any household item, especially a screwdriver, into a weapon, a saviour, a map, all purpose tool.

This queerness knows every language, speaks to every wave, trusts in the universe despite knowing we could easily be Gods of it as this point, know how to hide by whatever identification people need to see to believe us, always embrace the loneliness. Even if it is the only thing to stay.

I am not new, but an ancient force, still hopeful, still surviving. I’m the motherfucking Doctor and don’t you fucking forget it. Bitch.

More information: aylaxc.sullivan (at) gmail (dot) com

Luna and Zodiac, from The Interrobangers and the Mystery of the Foggy Bluffs Monster, by Sloth Levine

LUNA: I’m learning that there’s an interplay between being queer and believing in magic. In monsters, aliens, ghosts. Look, I’m real. I’m not a girl and I’m not a boy, which people don’t believe. But I live in, I am, this in-between space. Everything’s built on the facts of gender. But I am my own proof that those rules mean nothing unless you want them to. It’s a secret I get to keep to myself. But I feel like I’m a goblin inhabiting a human body. And sometimes that starts to hurt, and sometimes the world feels like it’s falling apart. I’m the opposite of those crazy people in rubber costumes, the ones we investigate. They dress up like horrors to scare people away or feel powerful, but underneath it’s always a human committing a crime. I’m a human, but not in the same way. Or maybe exactly the same way. But I know that there is more to being a human than being a boy or girl, or straight or just gay. And that’s a kind of magic. So if I exist, then who is to say that some monsters aren’t just costumes? Maybe all the way through, there are animals that aren’t human, that aren’t strictly flesh and blood.

Context: Playing off of tropes from tv series like The X Files, Scooby Doo, and Twin Peaks, 4 teenagers and a dog investigate a monster that may or may not have kidnapped one of them six years earlier.

Luna is a non binary person who has relied on science and reason to make it through high school. They are the valedictorian, but not well liked by their classmates until Zodiac moves back into town. Zodiac introduces his study of aliens and the supernatural to Luna, and they bond over their uncertain queer identities.

*****

ZODIAC: It feels like I’m not here. I can hear you but it feels like you’re on the other side of a window holding a walkie talkie. Like when you’re looking through binoculars and you suddenly become aware of the sides of the lenses. And you’re not holding them right up to your eyes. But you can still kind of see through the glass. I think it’s the aliens. It’s like. Sometimes they check in on me. And they push me out of the way a little bit. You know, I think they just wanted to study human beings. And for some reason they chose me. But they chose wrong. Because I’m not a human being. I’m just not quite there. And it’s their fault. Maybe I was a human being until they decided to look at me. If they didn’t do this, I could, I could probably just. Be alive. And not feel like I was trapped inside of this.

Context: Zodiac was abducted when he was 12. The police insist he was abused by a man who worked as a janitor at his school. Zodiac is now 18 and believes he was actually abducted by aliens and dealing with a government conspiracy. In this monologue he experiences dissociation as his friends try to help him find his lost dog, the one constant in his life since the abduction.

More information: slothlevine (at) gmail (dot) com